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Hollywood Chronicle

THE MAKING OF “SOME LIKE IT HOT”My Memories of Marilyn Monroe and the Classic American Movie.By Tony Curtis with Mark A. Vieira.Wiley, $25.95.

Curtis’s writing in this memoir of Billy Wilder’s 1959 comic masterpiece is staccato, repetitive and occasionally baffling. But even if the voice is a little insane — on Wilder: “He was wiry. Energetic. I don’t think I ever saw him stand still. Not a guy given to repose. Always moving. Like his pictures” — it suits the edgy, emotionally charged set of “Some Like It Hot” perfectly. There are sexual encounters with Marilyn Monroe, whom Curtis describes as his “first adult relationship.” They slept together both before she was a major star and later, when they were working together on this film. It’s left an open question whether Monroe was subsequently pregnant by Curtis or by her husband at the time, Arthur Miller. What is definite is that the racy seduction scene on the yacht in “Some Like It Hot” was Method acting at its finest. Speaking of the Method, Curtis suggests that Lee and Paula Strasberg were to blame for Monroe’s neurotic behavior on the set and her failure to get there with any regularity. “Before going to the Actors Studio she was like a tightrope walker who doesn’t know there was a pit she could fall into,” Curtis quotes Wilder as saying. “After the Strasbergs got to her, she thought of nothing but the pit.” Sometimes Curtis’s revelations about Monroe feel invasive (especially when it comes to her abortions and miscarriages) or borderline mean (were her hips really those of “a Polish washerwoman”?). But to the extent that he could overcome his own dazzling narcissism, Curtis was clearly under her spell. His book (written with Mark A. Vieira) may be more feverish than fluent, but it’s a wonderful tribute to one of the funniest movies ever made.

AMERICAN REBELThe Life of Clint Eastwood.By Marc Eliot.Harmony, $25.99.

Eliot’s formulaic and occasionally overblown analysis of Clint Eastwood’s life in Hollywood (“And on it went, the low din of whispers that had followed Clint around for his entire career, like Shakespeare’s infamous sound and fury”) paints Eastwood as shrewd, gifted and a bit of a cad. For Eliot, Eastwood is the ultimate alpha male, and not always in a good way. His movies have often placed women in the category of “murderer, witch, prostitute, deceiver or helpless victim.” In his personal life, he’s had seven children by five different women: evidence, Eliot suggests, that while Eastwood has played “the role of the happy Hollywood husband,” he was always “a lone-wolf womanizer.” Sondra Locke, his former longtime companion, has said Eastwood pressured her into repeat abortions and set her up with a ­career-devastating sham development deal at Warner Brothers. Eliot provides a great deal of detailed information about how each of Eastwood’s films came together. We learn that Eastwood has always been a first-rate star, and has always been terrific at bringing films in on time and under budget as a director. Eliot’s Eastwood is the kind of guy you’d kill to have starring in or directing your movie — but not someone who’s been as dependable on the home front.

This memoir by Orson Welles’s daughter — whom he eccentrically named Christopher — is remarkably kind toward Welles, even though he was by all evidence a terrible father. In one heartbreaking scene, the young Christopher sits all dressed up in the front hall of her mother’s house from noon until dusk awaiting her father’s arrival for their lunch date; he never shows. At other times he materializes like a genie and lavishes her with attention, making her delirious with joy, as though he were not her father but the love of her life. “To feel this way about your father is not natural or desirable,” a headmistress tells her. Feder’s glamorous, miserable childhood and the pain it caused her will be familiar to anyone who’s read “The Drama of the Gifted Child.” While Welles dismissed her acting ambitions and vanished for years at a time, Feder’s stepfather constantly belittled her; her mother beat her and called her “a little bore.” Positive relationships — for example, with her stepmother Rita Hayworth or her crush Danny Kaye — were short-lived. With only occasional help from kindly relatives or friends, Feder essentially raised herself. Still, until Welles’s death in 1985 she maintained hope that he would come around to fatherhood. “In addition to being a director, actor, magician and one of the most spellbinding personalities of the 20th century,” she wondered, “why couldn’t he also be Dad?” And yet she is far more loving than bitter. Miraculously, Feder seems to have become a well-grounded adult, with a “steadfast” husband and a good career, first as an encyclopedia editor and an educational writer and now as an accomplished memoirist. Along with providing Welles’s fans with behind-the-scenes insight, the book is a testimony to one woman’s exceptional gift for self-preservation.

IN AND OUT OF HOLLYWOODA Biographer’s Memoir.By Charles Higham.Terrace/University of Wisconsin, $29.95.

The author of the Hepburn biography “Kate” and numerous other books is a master at getting celebrities to reveal themselves. Now, in this autobiography, Higham is like an accompanist suddenly grabbing the microphone from the diva and shouting, “My turn!” Thus we learn that Higham — who is so old-school that he’s apparently never learned to use a computer — can boast of just as crazy a life as any of his subjects. He had a gothic childhood (the author claims, later in life, to have had encounters with ghosts) and was party to an astounding number of star secrets. He reports that Errol Flynn was a Nazi collaborator; Walt Disney disliked nearly all of his company’s movies; and Bette Davis, Hedda Hopper and Marlene Dietrich were — believe it or not — homo­phobic. Despite the Hollywood gossip, the book sometimes feels like a vanity project. When Higham waxes poetic about his wealthy and abusive childhood, no literary device is left unturned: “We fished for tadpoles that flickered like living commas in the brackish stream water . . . and examined the strange, lumpy gray forms of lichen on tree boles.” This over-the-top prose gives way to matter-of-fact accounts of his pre-AIDS-era promiscuity, featuring orgies, prostitutes and bathhouses. But by the later pages, in which Higham tiresomely brags about his success and settles old scores, it’s clearly time for him to hand the mic back to the stars.

Ada Calhoun is a frequent contributor to the Book Review and the author of “Instinctive Parenting,” which will be published next year.

A version of this review appears in print on December 6, 2009, on Page BR38 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Hollywood Chronicle. Today's Paper|Subscribe